Désirée Congo

The newest English translation of one of Haiti’s most powerful literary voices

Désirée Congo is a riveting, powerful, and profoundly original novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this richly textured work, Trouillot--one of the leading voices of the francophone literary world--constructs an intricate narrative web from the varied experiences of freedmen and women, maroons, enslaved African people and their Creole children, as well as French planters and white smallholders in colonial Saint-Domingue at a historical moment of unthinkable upheaval. It is a moving, lyrical book whose strikingly realized characters enrich our understanding of the last confrontations between the Haitian revolutionaries and Napoleon’s imperial forces--a conflict that resulted in the success of the largest slave revolt in recorded history and the independence of the first Black state in the western hemisphere.

Évelyne Trouillot was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she lives and works as a university professor. She is the prizewinning author of short stories, poetry, and novels, including Memory at Bay (Éditions Hoëbeke, 2010; trans. UVA Press, 2015). M. A. Salvodon is a Professor in the History, Language and Global Culture Department at Suffolk University, where she is also Associate Dean of Experiential Learning, Global Education & Public Impact. She is co-translator of Tomboy with J-M Gavarini (University of Nebraska Press, 2007) and translator of The Infamous Rosalie (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).